Title: How communicative and cultural pressures shape natural language

Abstract:

How do languages become the way they are today? This thesis investigates two factors shaping linguistic variation: communication and culture.  The first study examines cross-linguistic variation in spatial demonstrative systems (e.g., “here”', “from there”).  While some languages encode only distance, others additionally mark orientation (e.g., “to”, “at”, “from”).  Using information-theoretic tools and a dataset of 220 languages, we show that attested systems are optimal in balancing informativity and complexity. Languages differ in how they weigh these competing pressures. The second study investigates naming systems across cultures. Despite surface differences between East Asian and Western traditions, historical data reveal a shared information structure: the first element (e.g., “Chen”, “Edward”) is less informative than the second (e.g., “Sihan”, “Gibson”), enabling efficient individual distinction. However, sociopolitical processes transformed different components into hereditary patronyms, first in East Asia, second in the West, reshaping name informativeness. Modern scientific publishing, following Western conventions, reduces the distinguishability of East Asian authors by abbreviating their more informative given names. The third study focuses on legal language complexity. Legal language is often difficult to understand because of long-distance syntactic dependencies, but it remains unclear why laws are written in such a convoluted way. Here we introduce a possible explanation: it is a result of lawmakers trying to describe complex concepts underlying laws in single sentences. Indeed, we found legalese texts in ancient China exhibit longer dependencies than contemporary non-legalese ones because these legal texts often include the offense and the punishment in the same sentence. On the other hand, we found a much smaller difference in dependencies between the two genres in modern Chinese than previously observed in American English, possibly because Chinese lawmakers adopted simpler alternative ways to convey the same meaning.

On Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92636073077